


Samson and Delilah (The Awful Millenials Remix)

by Bottomfeeder



Category: American Horror Story: Cult
Genre: F/M, Identity Issues, Misses Clause Challenge, Non-Explicit Incest, POV Second Person, hair symbolism, is a thing, see: fairy tales and the bible, the nature of storytelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 14:17:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13055697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bottomfeeder/pseuds/Bottomfeeder
Summary: Was it just me or did Ryan Murphy really want you to drive yourself nuts trying to understand the importance of his characters’ hair choices this season? 90% of my viewing time was distracted by the need to crack the super secret hair code.This is the result of that. Plus some other things. But it all started with the hair.





	Samson and Delilah (The Awful Millenials Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gaialux](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaialux/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! Thank you for being okay with this pairing, dear recipient. It’s damn near impossible for me to ignore it in this show, and I don’t know what I would have written otherwise if you weren’t. I sincerely hope I entertain you at least a little bit and didn’t go too far off the rails.

The poison trucks are inspired by something Kai reads in one of his post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. Which you know because they used to be _your_ post-apocalyptic science fiction novels. You started reading them in college, your own private little defiance of Literature. You were so sick of literature and its lack of a satisfying, thrilling conclusion.

__

__

 

It started during the time when Professor X-Rated _(you refuse to say his name anymore, not even in the privacy of your own mind)_ pissed you off enough that you finally dropped him from your extracurricular activities.

__

__

 

He hated science fiction. You thought of him one day when you passed the Science Fiction/Fantasy section in a Barnes & Noble. There was a book that caught your eye. The sky on the cover was a blazing orange and it lit the grim faces of a man and a woman. The woman was beautiful and devastating and so was the wounded man she was holding up. She had a big futuristic gun slung around one shoulder and his arm around the other. For the moment, they were just out of reach of a world exploding behind them.

__

__

 

One glance, and you were fixed in that moment in time (both present and imagined), overcome with an alchemy of pure envy, wonder, despair, spite, fatalism and love. You weren’t thinking of Professor X-Rated just then.

__

__

 

You shook yourself out of the daze when an employee asked if you needed help with anything. Yes, you said. I want this. You bought it that day and read it like a dirty secret while Kyle tapped his hate onto his keyboard.

__

__

 

He was becoming more and more distracted by his bitterness every day and you managed to keep your habit of escaping his notice for a while, something you hadn’t been able to accomplish with your first bra, your first vibrator, or your first boyfriend.

__

__

 

Ever since then, you would pick up another book full of terrifying aliens and epic space battles whenever you needed to go anywhere that wasn’t inside this house. Even if it was just in the privacy if your own mind. _(Something you used to have? Or never did? At what point did he fuck that up, too. Or that you fucked yourself up. Or you were you both just feeding and feeding on each other from the very beginning? You can’t decide. Maybe your birth was what sustained him and damned you both.)_

__

__

 

You wanted to escape to a place and time that was even more fucked up than here, but one in which the badass main characters were actually good at survival. Literally hacking away at their problems, they were always so viscerally alive, even when they made claims of being dead inside. They were _awake_ , not #woke.

__

__

 

You don’t feel like a main character—badass or otherwise. You feel like a throwaway. A plot device that enables the super-villain to find his motivation for world domination. Except when Kai focuses his attention on you. Then you feel like Pandora, maybe Cassandra. No one listens to you. You don’t even listen to you.

__

__

 

He’s been taking everything of yours and perverting it: turning it upside down and inside out. Converting it all into the negative image of itself. Black switches to white and white switches to black. You’re the sad little gray ghost in a kimono that drifts between the two. Some self-destructive dark spark inside of you is flattered. The worshipful little sister that won’t just lay down and die. ( _You really do love him. So many times you’ve wondered if Kai, and not the mother you share, gave birth to you. Sometimes you wonder if you’re his true mother figure._ ) The rest of you keeps free-falling down a black hole. You’re Alice, never making it to Wonderland.

__

__

 

You find yourself doing _this_ a lot: Talking to yourself _about_ yourself. Like you’re split in two. One of you—the ravaged, scared shitless, evil clown version of you is telling the old, relatively sane version of you, a story.

__

__

 

Such as:

__

__

 

Once upon a time,

You were still in college. Your friends were vapid, self-congratulatory human Instagram posts. They made hashtag jokes and talked about their hard-fought battles on the journey to self-discovery. They never shut up, but they also never severed limbs or engaged in a stabbing orgy with rubber nose-dicks on their heads. They didn’t join your pill-popping big brother’s cult and poison little boys with stomach-churning videos meant to rob them of their innocence.

__

__

 

Once upon a time, 

You thought it’d be cool to match your hair to your name. To re-brand yourself as the Motherfucking Snow Queen. The fucking White Witch of Narnia. She who is numb, untouched by all of the bitterly cold reality around her. Untouchable.

__

__

 

Once upon a time,

Your big brother walked into the bathroom without knocking. Nothing that unusual for the two of you.

 

You’d been in there for over an hour, and he must’ve gotten bored watching the same Menendez brothers documentary for the tenth time.

 

Your hair is mostly dry at this point, so he’s able to get the full effect as you stare at his reflection in the mirror staring at yours from behind you.

 

He’d been pissed at you earlier, after grabbing your phone to see who kept texting you. You never should’ve used your professor’s name just to win an argument. To quote his insights on angry young men and their toxic masculinity.

 

But Prince Charming’s on a rampage no longer. 

__

__

 

”You look so different.” His voice is hushed, almost reverent. 

__

__

 

He lifts a silver-gray strand that slips into your face when you turn to look at the real him, and not just his reflection. He wields his fascinated gaze like a scalpel to slice you out of your daydream. He never did like you going anywhere without him. Not even in your own mind—especially then. His full attention span vibrates inside your bones like a medical drill. He might as well be trepanning you. But it’s the childlike awe that does you in.

__

__

 

He rests his chin on your head. 

__

__

 

“Do _me_.” 

__

__

 

The words are two short jabs into your skull. You don’t mind, though you fight to breathe normally. Normal. The thought would put a smirk in the corner of your mouth if you didn’t catch it in time. You don’t want Kai thinking you’re laughing at him right now even though you used to all the time. You don’t want to break this moment between you.

__

__

 

“What color?” 

__

__

 

You don’t know why you sound so breathless, other than the fact that all of the real moments between the two of you always seem to happen in the bathroom. It’s why you never lock him out. It’s your story and you can let any other possible reasons remain unsaid. 

 

“I don’t know yet,” he says.

__

__

 

“Let me know when you do.” 

__

__

 

He will anyway, but you want a promise. He slow- binks those bottomless brown eyes at you— _you_ -you, not your reflection—taking it in.

__

__

 

“I will.”

__

__

 

Your eyes aren’t quite as dark, but your smile is just as slow and he reflects it back at you. It’s been so long since you last gave each other something to smile at.

__

__

 

It’s enough for now.

__

__

 

*

The thing about Once-upon-a-times is that they’re always followed by Happily-ever-afters, none of which bode well for the witches and monsters of the story.

__

__

 

*

__

__

 

A week later, when he still hasn’t decided yet, you go out and buy a bunch of wild colors you know he won’t like and one you hope he does. You’re sure enough you’d bet your life on it. 

__

__

 

You line them all up on the bathroom counter and raise an eyebrow. 

__

__

 

“Well?”

__

__

 

“I need something intense, but still . . .”

__

__

 

”Pretty?” 

__

__

 

 _Now_ you’re smirking.

__

__

 

He frowns.

__

__

 

”Not hideous.”

__

__

 

You wait and watch his eyes scan from Glittering Garnet to Heart Attack Pink to Luscious Lime. You’d laugh at his seriousness if this didn’t feel so inexplicably dire.

__

__

 

“There. That one. The blue.”

__

__

 

“I think you mean _Forcefield_ Blue.”

__

__

 

You’re just teasing to cut the tension, but it just leads to your reflections having another staring contest.

__

__

 

You and Other You are thinking about when you were little and you used to sit between his legs with your back against his chest. You would practice your reading skills by reading aloud to him from a big book of nursery rhymes. One of your favorites was “Little Boy Blue”.

__

__

 

You remember the fairy tales, too: Goldilocks and Rapunzel. Snow White and Rose Red. Bluebeard. How it seemed like all of the stories you read together related to hair and colors. You were both named after the same fairy tale. It’s fitting that you stain yourselves to fit the part.

__

__

 

From the way he’s looking at you, you think he remembers it, too.

 

Later, you have smurf hands because he insisted you skip the gloves. You’re still not sure if he was saving them, or if he wanted to leave his mark on you the way you were leaving your mark on him, or if—if he wanted to feel—

__

__

 

If. If, nothing.

__

__

 

Knowing Kai, probably All of the Above.

__

__

 

You can’t decide which is more satisfying: Scraping your fingers into Kai’s scalp until he’s at the point where he’s trying not to give you the satisfaction of making any noise and failing miserably, or the heady trust he bestows on you when you run a blade down his throat, even when he knows you're angry with him. For some perverse reason, it seems like he trusts you especially then.

__

__

 

“I AM _REBORN_!”

__

__

 

He shrieks like some resurrected supervillain, shooting up out of the chair with a manic grin. He swings around behind you so he can rest his bright blue head against your frosty gray, admiring the way the colors look together. You tilt your head back to smile at him.

Your chest aches from the tenderness in his gaze, but it comes with a shiver not unlike the kind you get when someone walks across your grave.

 

_And they lived hap—_

__

__

 

You’d settle for _And they_ lived.

__

__

 

Storytime’s over. The Once-upon-a-time has its Happily-ever-after. Now for the critical analysis. It’s not like you don’t have the time.

__

__

 

So you splinter again. Two of you for the two sides of the table. One of you has an old school recording device and a pencil and notebook and wears a suit. The other wears a pair of handcuffs and a smirk.

__

__

 

Did _you_ do this to him? Profiler You asks Serial Killer You. You and your need to play at being someone else? To play dress-up and slip into someone else’s skin? Did you pollute his mind every time you looked at him with your needy little sister eyes longer than you were supposed to? Did you tip the balance? Were you the catalyst that set him on this path?

__

__

 

After all, it wasn’t _Vincent_ who Kai started his cult with. It was _you_. It was _your_ bright blue influence that he had to cut out of himself. He even made you do it for him. He knew how much it would hurt. How much closer you would take it to the razor’s edge. The man he wanted to fuck into fucking you had _your_ hair color. 

__

__

 

 _Did_ you?

You find yourself talking to yourself _about_ yourself like something that happened a long, long time ago. Like you’re split in two. Other You keeps telling Old You a story.

As if there could ever be a different ending for the villains of the story. As if you could tell it into existence yourself.

__

__

 

Once upon a time:

Kay and the Snow Queen.

__

__

 

Once upon a time: 

Kai and Winter.

__

__

 

Once upon a time. 

 

Rinse and repeat if necessary. Rinse and repeat.

__

__

 

Try again.

__

__

 

Rinse. Repeat.

__

__

 

Repeat

__

__

 

Repeat

__

__

 

Repeat

__

__

 

*  


__

__

 

An unfinished story of a wasted life is all that is left of you. The scraps of your thoughts spin faster and faster, an angry vortex that drives the debris of you upward in a propulsive motion. You smash against something solid—

__

__

 

A door. It’s a door—Funny how something so mundane can fill you with so much inexplicable hope—

__

__

 

There’s a knock from the other side. Before you have time to process that, it happens again, louder this time. _KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK._ The sound becomes your entire world.

__

__

 

You can’t knock back. You’re pressed up against the wood from the howling current of air propelling you forward—

__

__

 

But the door slams open and you’re a dam bursting. You flood the suddenly open night sky with electrical current—

__

__

 

You draw breath for the first time in what feels like forever. You didn’t know you were horizontal until suddenly you’re not, or that you weren’t flesh and bone until suddenly you are.

__

__

 

You drop from the air like a bag of wet cement.

__

__

 

“Fuck, that _hurts_.”

__

__

 

You jump, startled by the sound of your own voice. Which you didn’t realize until now how much you had missed it.

__

__

 

“Life is pain.”

__

__

 

You din’t recognize the flip voice and you jump again. It occurs to you you have eyes again. You realize there’s a beautiful blonde girl—woman?—with the most haunting—or is it haunted?—eyes you’ve ever seen standing in front of you with her hands raised above her head in a dramatic gesture. She slowly lowers thwm to her sides.

__

__

 

You gasp. Holy shit—

__

__

 

Standing next to her is—

__

__

 

No. That’s not—

 

Blonde girl shakes her head at her expression, but not meanly. 

__

__

 

“No, he’s not yours. This one’s mine.” 

 

She quirks a half-smile and Kai’s doppelganger slips his hand into hers.

__

__

 

You don’t doubt it. This boy—and he does seem more boyish—has the same bottomless dark brown eyes, but there’s a purity there that Kai never had. Not to mention the unshaved fluffy blonde hair.

 

__

__

 

The girl points to him.

__

__

 

“This is Kyle. I’m Zoe.”

__

__

 

You consider choosing something else, but, fuck it. 

 

“Winter.”

__

__

 

“We know.”

 

“Why are you here? In a—”

__

__

 

Your brand-new eyes skip like stones over your surroundings.

 

“Cemetery.”

__

__

 

“You answered the call.”

__

__

 

Like it’s that simple.

__

__

 

“We were wondering if you’d like to start over.”

 

You take a moment to admit to yourself that you still can’t let go.

__

__

 

“What about—”

__

__

 

“The Other One?”

__

__

 

A dark smile forms on Zoe’s face as she shares a loaded look with Kyle. It’s the kind of smile that you use when you know you haven’t learned your lesson.

__

__

 

“It’s not impossible.”

__

__

 

That’s more hope than you’ve had in years. Why not go for broke.

__

__

 

“Can you make my hair grow neon orange?”

__

__

 

Zoe bursts out laughing, making her seem more teen than tragic baby Stevie Nicks. Kyle-Not-Kai gives you a look like you’re the weird one.

__

__

 

[FIN]


End file.
